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Bob Cohn

Bob Cohn - Bob Cohn is editorial director of Atlantic Digital. He has worked as executive editor at Wired and The Industry Standard and as a writer at Newsweek. More

Bob Cohn is editorial director of Atlantic Digital. He oversees editorial operations for TheAtlantic.com, The Atlantic Wire, and The Atlantic's mobile platforms.

Prior to joining TheAtlantic.com in January 2009, Cohn was for eight years the executive editor of Wired Magazine. He oversaw all editorial aspects of the magazine, helping to supervise a staff of 40 journalists and dozens of freelancers. Under his leadership, Wired was nominated seven times for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence and won the honor three times.

For nearly two years during the dot-com boom, Cohn was executive editor at The Industry Standard, a newsweekly covering the Internet economy. He directed a staff of writers and editors, planned and edited cover stories, and was in charge of editorial special projects, including the company's extensions into television, radio, international publishing, and new domestic magazines. During the late '90s, he worked four years as editor and, later, publisher of Stanford magazine, and as editorial director of the Stanford Alumni Association, overseeing the bimonthly magazine, the online department, electronic newsletters, and other communications programs.

Cohn began his journalism career at Newsweek, where he worked in the Washington bureau for 10 years. He served as the magazine's legal affairs correspondent, with responsibility for the Supreme Court, the Justice Department, and the FBI, and later was named the magazine's White House correspondent. He covered the presidency of Bill Clinton from 1993 to early 1996.

Cohn's work has been recognized with a variety of national awards for editing and writing. TheAtlantic.com won a Webby Award for Best Magazine in 2009 and in 2010 was nominated for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in two categories: Best Magazine Web Site and Magazine of the Year (Print/Digital). During his tenure at Wired, the magazine was nominated for 11 National Magazine Awards and won six, including the three citations for General Excellence. At Newsweek, where he shared in more than a dozen awards, he was honored with the American Bar Association's prestigious Silver Gavel Award for coverage of the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation process. At Stanford magazine, a story he wrote on the university's affirmative action policies was named best article of the year in college magazines. The next year, Stanford was named the best university publication in the country by Folio magazine.

Cohn graduated from Stanford with high honors and later earned a master's degree in the Study of Law from Yale Law School as a Ford Foundation Fellow. A native of Chicago, he lives with his wife and two daughters outside Washington, D.C.
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"Radar" O'Reilly

By Bob Cohn

Jul 27 2009, 1:32 PM ET Comment

Tim O'Reilly has 833,025 followers on Twitter. No doubt more by the time you click over to his account. And he's written 7,688 status updates. Not only that, but as one of the smartest writers and thinkers on technology, he's devoted some time to figuring out what Twitter really means -- and how he can best use it. He compares himself to a point guard on a basketball team -- "handing out assists" by "using my retweets to build the visibility of others and create and foster a community that cares about the ideas, trends, and people that I care about."



In an interview with me at the Aspen Ideas Festival, O'Reilly talked about Twitter as "a new kind of real-time nervous system for news." Sure it's easy to dismiss as trivial the answer to Twitter's relentless demand What are you doing? Says O'Reilly: "Many times it's trivial. but other times the personal becomes very important, and [people are tweeting], 'Whoa, I just saw a jetliner landing on the Hudson, and here's a picture of it....That's a fundamental change. We're all news reporters now."

O'Reilly, a tech book publisher and conference organizer, is famous for his radar, for knowing what's coming next on the tech front. So get ready for eyeglasses with built-in facial recognition software -- and a screen to remind you of the name of that guy from accounting that you're talking to.

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